What does this mean about airline security?

Like Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan, I received a mass e-mail linking to this disturbing first-person account by Annie Jacobsen in WomensWallStreet.com on mysterious doings onboard a Northwest flight from Detroit to Los Angeles (hopefully, she’s not this Annie Jacobsen). The quick summary: a bunch of Arab gentlemen holding Syrian passports act in an extremely suspicious manner during the flight. Michelle Malkin confirms at least part of the Jacobsen story, and a February 2004 story by Jason Burke in the Sunday Observer adds some plausibility to the behavior of the suspected terrorists in the story. This is the part of Jacobsen’s account that Malkin confirms:

Within a few hours I received a call from Dave Adams, the Federal Air Marshal Services (FAM) Head of Public Affairs. Adams told me what he knew: There were 14 Syrians on NWA flight #327. They were questioned at length by FAM, the FBI and the TSA upon landing in Los Angeles. The 14 Syrians had been hired as musicians to play at a casino in the desert. Adams said they were scrubbed. None had arrest records (in America, I presume), none showed up on the FBI’s no fly list or the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List. The men checked out and they were let go. According to Adams, the 14 men traveled on Northwest Airlines flight #327 using one-way tickets. Two days later they were scheduled to fly back on jetBlue from Long Beach, California to New York — also using one-way tickets. I asked Adams why, based on the FBI’s credible information that terrorists may try to assemble bombs on planes, the air marshals or the flight attendants didn’t do anything about the bizarre behavior and frequent trips to the lavatory. Our FAM agents have to have an event to arrest somebody. Our agents aren’t going to deploy until there is an actual event, Adams explained. He said he could not speak for the policies of Northwest Airlines.

On the other hand, a post in the brand-new blog Red State voices some understandable skepticism. This blogger suggests that what looked like suspicious activity was actually Muslims behaving in a devout manner. There are parts of the story that sound over the top to me as well — the only thing missing from Jacobsen’s narrative to make the Syrian guys seem more evil is thick moustaches. The link to Ann Coulter doesn’t make me feel any more sanguine. I’m not saying something disturbing didn’t happen, but I have as many questions about the Jacobsen story as I do for the Federal Air Marshalls. Give it a read and think it over while perusing the fact that the Bush administration has scrapped its Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS) II program for screening airline passengers. For more on the CAPPS debate, check out Ryan Singel’s account in Wired. Orin Kerr wonders:

Why haven’t major newspapers and TV picked up on it? My guess is that the blogosphere won’t let up until there are some answers, and that the pressure will yield some answers sooner rather than later.

I can say that the e-mail sent to me and other bloggers was cc-ed to movers and shakers in the mediasphere — Bill Keller, David Ignatius, George Will, Anne Applebaum, and Nichoas D. Kristoff. So they’re certainly aware of the story. My guess is they’re probably ignoring the initial message because the originator of the e-mail tends to send out a regular stream of these messages, and the signal-to-noise ratio is quite low. Another possible trajectory is Matt Drudge linking to the story — he’s #2 on The Note’s “list of people who have incredible power in this election year to influence the entire free media cycle.” The interest by bloggers in the story, however, might prove to be enough of a spur to the mediasphere. I’m on the skeptical side of the spectrum — but I’d like to see real journalists dig deeper into this. UPDATE: Michelle Malkin now reports that the blogosphere will be getting results from the mediasphere:

[T]he Washington Post has been sitting on the true story of Annie Jacobsen’s “Terror in the Skies” account since last Friday…. Dave Adams, the air marshal’s spokesman, not only confirmed the story, but has also apparently supplied witness statements and other corroborations of Jacobsen’s account. NBC Nightly News, ABC, and Dateline NBC are now on the story as well.

On the other hand, Malkin talked with Jacobsen, and is told, “”My legs were like rubber… It was four and a half hours of terror” — which again sounds over the top. Donald Sensing is also suspicious. He raises the perfectly valid point that one should not be too surprised at seeing a large number of Arabs boarding an airplane in Detroit, given the large concentration of Arabs living in Dearborn and its environs. Glenn Reynolds has more, including this optimistic take. That said, it appears the system is working. [What system?–ed. The system whereby private actors can monitor government actors to see if the latter are doing their job. The blogosphere is only the latest link in that chain.] FINAL UPDATE: I close out my thoughts on Jacoibsen’s story here and here.